


Strength in Control, Control in Strength

by pansexualstein (octavia_romanus)



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Backstory, Emotional Baggage, F/F, F/M, Hyperanalysis, Random Unnamed Male, Sarcastic Lord Death, hand holding, headcanons, maybe? - Freeform, no idea what to tag for this, one-sided, ya ya ~
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-26
Updated: 2015-02-26
Packaged: 2018-03-15 06:55:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3437738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/octavia_romanus/pseuds/pansexualstein
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The other one was her polar opposite, someone she could barely begin to understand. The other one, as she liked to dub her, was committed and flighty, recklessly powerful and embarrassingly foolish. She loved and hated with all her might, and the turn of one inch of her lips three degrees counterclockwise, a million multifaceted emotions roared to life like a lion awoken from slumber, loudly protesting with no regard for the other life around him."</p>
<p>Azusa does a lot of thinking underneath those glasses of hers. Mostly about a certain blonde-haired enigma.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strength in Control, Control in Strength

She was strong. 

She had to be. It was the way she'd been raised, the way it had always been, the way she was meant to be. She was strong  _because_. It was a façade, a mask over a trembling soul. She kept her mouth in a firm line, words coming out organized, clipped and clear, the way she liked them. Whatever left her body was strictly regulated by her psyche. With a tilt of her head, precisely 45° to the right, her eyes-- which, as she'd been told from a young age, were the windows to her soul-- became shrouded with glare.

But the other one? The other one was her polar opposite, someone she could barely begin to understand. The other one, as she liked to dub her, was committed and flighty, recklessly powerful and embarrassingly foolish. She loved and hated with all her might, and the turn of one inch of her lips three degrees counterclockwise, a million multifaceted emotions roared to life like a lion awoken from slumber, loudly protesting with no regard for the other life around him.

And, looking at the blonde (she'd heard somewhere that blonde girls were infinitely more idiotic than other women, which was just petty; hair colour had no influence on such things as intelligence and proper conduct), the woman found it impossible to pin her down, clairvoyant as she was.

There was power in that, she supposed. Being so open made others confused, promoted trust and mistrust alike. Being open in a closed world was paradoxical, unorthodox, and she supposed that was what made the other one so, so wonderfully enigmatic.

She exhaled, breath hot enough to curl across the coolness of the winter air, and again, like most everything else in the world, it reminded her of the other one, so fiery in her passion that she stood out against the wintry air.

It couldn't have been healthy to obsess over her so much, to use her precious idle thought to scrutinize her, to commit her smile to memory and to map out the curves of her body only to file it away in her subconscious, where they returned in her dreams.

She swallowed past the heart that seemed to relocate itself to her throat when she got nervous. And then she frowned. Disdain. Superiority. Distance. Objectivity. What she liked to present to the world, who she'd been trained to become.

She stepped into the Death Room, two clicking footsteps. Passively curious eyes regarded her, mixtures of terror and nerves. One hand waved.

Her hand.

Something akin to fear stirred in the clairvoyant, and she stifled it with a curt nod, seating herself in the last chair.

"I'm really glad you made it, Azusa," the other one exclaimed, before even the ever-jovial Death could offer up a lilting greeting.

"Yes, yes, we're all thrilled~" the leader trilled, and Azusa stifled a laugh, fought to keep even the beginnings of a smile from touching her lips. One day, the other one had asked, wide-eyed, "What if Lord Death is just really sarcastic all the time?" and then, after a moment was taken to reflect, added, "It's not like we can  _see_  his face and tell if he's joking, you know!"

Only he could make her laugh. Only she could permeate the frosty barrier the woman had set up. Only she could cause the faint stirrings of emotion in her chest, insignificant tremors to most, but moving mountains to the girl who'd closed herself years before.

Girl--  _woman_. She was grown; she'd made sure of that. No longer was she a young weapon in a family of meisters, no longer did she spark heated "discussions" between her parents-- " _Well_  then, where did she get the weapon blood from? Not from  _me_ , that's for sure!"-- she'd broken away from that, from the hooded "We love you, Yumi," from the hurt in her parents' eyes as they viewed infidelity incarnate. "Yumi" became "he wasn't supposed to find out", became "I thought she loved me", became "the reason our family's ripped apart".

"The reason our family's ripped apart" was the short stick. She ran away to a school for weapons, a safe place.

"I thought she loved me" fell in love with an enigma, with a riddle she could never truly solve. As long as she couldn't understand it, she wouldn't be wrong. If she expected nothing, none of her expectations could possibly be shattered.

Azusa-- for she was  _Azusa_ , now that she'd been freed from her parents' labels-- clenched and uncle chef her fist, only half-listening to the masked deity. She knew what love was as a teenager. If only it were as easy as an adult.

_I've gotten over you_ , she whispered to the knot in her stomach. The other one smiled consolingly-- she always did know when the woman was struggling to keep focus. She swallowed the discomfort down. When she was a teenager, it didn't feel like this. She was jealous, hot-headed, embarrassed, murderously passionate. And what was she now? Distantly curious, quiet, evasive, icily numb. She wasn't still in love-- what a thought.

Some of that old passion awoke in her, and she furiously stifled it. She wasn't stupid; where did teenage fancy leave her? Sobbing into her pillow, meister off kissing some other girl, the other one matching her heartbeat against the door.

She used to love others. She used to trust them. But adulthood didn't allow for such foolishness. Other weapons looked to their meisters; Azusa looked to herself.

As the other one smiled, "I thought she loved me" closed herself off, locked herself from the lecherous and the treacherous, and all that remained was the armour forged through divorce and heartbreak, glinting dully behind a face of glass.

Yet, as Azusa remained, cautiously reflective, spectacles unfolding across her spectacles, she knew that somewhere along the road, she'd forgotten something.

It seemed like the natural human response to miss that elusive "something", to obsess and agonize and wail like a child. She saw that response often enough; it wouldn't be out of place. In fact, it seemed almost  _normal_ , to hunt for something lost or missed, to seek the piece of a self. The clairvoyant supposed that she might act this way if she didn't know what she'd lost. But she did.

Somewhere, at some point, she'd forgotten how to love, how to feel that rush of emotion, of  _any_  emotion. Now, she was empty, a vessel no one dared to fill, drained of euphoria and misery alike.

Was she supposed to miss that? Was she supposed to miss the ache of inadequacy? Was she supposed to miss the loneliness, to miss waiting for touches that would never come, to miss the resentment flaring in her heart at her meister,  _her own meister_?

Whether she was supposed to or not, she didn't. She was strong. She had to be. She couldn't let this be like when she was young, holding a pillow to her chest as her heartbeat overtook all thought, thrusting her into a world of  _him_ and _her,_ unable to see her own self, unable to readily believe her own fantasies. She had to be strong, to remember that the ache of loneliness was simply an ache. She'd survived worse. And, besides, searching for some  _soul mate_  wasn't going to make her life any easier.

So she watched with masochistic eyes as the other one avidly discussed her point, all fists and fire. She knew how to get the others riled up, to whip them into their own frenzies of emotion. Azusa simply remained, arms folded underneath her chest, spine relaxed-- not that she was  _slouching_ , mind you; she just didn't have her back against the chair.

The woman knew that the others would cave to the other one, and as they shook hands with each other (a custom that seemed pointless, but was apparently groundbreaking in the eyes of Lord Death), Azusa slipped out of autopilot, shaking hands with a firm grip, like she was in control-- no,  _for_  she was in control.

When her hand came into contact with the other one's, her breath caught in her throat. Her hand, like the others', was warm, but hers was delicate porcelain-- no, wait, so was Justin's. Hers was light, but not limp-- no, no, there were others like that.

The truth struck Azusa like few revelations had the honour to. There simply wasn't anything inherently unique to the other one. Any one feature the clairvoyant could pick out was inevitably present in someone else. But her--  _her_ , the combination of all those features was unparalleled in all the world. Years of searching would never turn up any other  _her_.

Heat flares into her hand, leaving her arms stiff with ice. She had lost control of her body, wrist limp with agonizing helplessness. She was still reeling, the urgency of the new idea overwhelming her senses, her very grasp of the world.

Marie was a  _person_. Not an experiment, not a manifestation of Azusa's own repressed feelings, not simply an "other". She, with all of her enigmas, was  _Marie_. And Marie only existed right here, in front of her. If she lost her, she could never find another.

Did she look as stunned as she felt? Her breath was bated, her heart feeling painfully like it had stopped beating. 

Marie smiled at the other, and Azusa, at a loss for both words and control, let out a tiny, breathy chuckle, mouth turning up three degrees counterclockwise.

The handshake was unprofessionally long. The two women couldn't tear their gazes away, until, finally, the hazy noises of Lord Death's dismissal slowly bled through their dazed fantasies, their hyperfocus.

"You should smile more often." Marie's voice seemed to echo, filling the empty air around her with warmth. This wasn't like when the woman was a teenager-- and, yet, it could have been, if she'd ever dared to touch her, ever dared to speak with her, alone, when her attention was whole, wholly focused on Azusa.

And then, rounded pink lips glossed over two words-- the average woman spoke about 20,000 words a day, as Azusa recalled, so these two words were most likely not intended to mean so much.

_"It's cute."_

The compliment took root in her cheeks, scorching the skin there. Her thoughts were broken, as if something in her brain had shattered.

_But what-- But I-- You just-- And why--_

Thoughts stilted, face red, hands clammy, Azusa felt like Yumi again, lost in the wave of the girl who loved with all her heart, wanting so desperately to be important to her, but having nothing profound to say.

Finally, with a stumble in her words that Azusa would have frowned upon, Yumi-Azusa stated, "I'm not... At least, I don't think I'm..."

"Well, you  _are_ ," Marie grinned, moving her free hand to clasp the other's overheated one. "At least to  _me_."

Seven words to add to the twenty thousand. The two words from before had beat a crack in her armour forged from divorce and heartbreak, and all the words were slipping through to the bewildered Yumi inside.

"You-- are-- too." The words were stilted, their very utterance sending blood unbidden to her cheeks.

Marie didn't respond with words. Instead, she let go of one hand and pulled gently on the other, leading her companion somewhere, ushering her out into the great unknown.

"C'mon," she urged kindly. "Let's go."

Azusa nodded, relinquishing control. And for the first time, she was safe in insecurity.

And for the first time, it was okay to not be okay.


End file.
